If we’re speculating, it’s probably a balloon payment on her silence, both in public and in court.
I have an explanation for why Trump seems to survive all of his personal failings being shown to the world: None of Trump’s supporters care about his personality or personal failures, just as Patton supporters didn’t care about what a pompous bastard he could be. He is their fighter, their avatar in the battle against a system that they see as having been hijacked by their political enemies.
That’s why his popularity went UP with each indictment. To people who already believe the system is rigged against them, each indictment becomes proof of what they believe, rather than an example of Trump’s failings. To them this is single combat, and Trump is the only one who ‘fights’ and doesn’t capitulate to the system. That’s pretty much their only criterion.
This is also why the MAGA Republicans in Congress stupidly took down McCarthy. He committed the grave error of compromising with the other side. They’d have supported him if it was found out that he had embezzled money, but compromising with Democrates or the ‘Deep State’ ws a bridge too far for them.
So long as Trump keeps ‘fighting’, they’ll support him. And if he loses, they’ve already decided that the election will have to have been rigged. You don’t abandon your ‘fighter’ so long as he’s still on his feet. They’ll follow that tenet straight into electoral suicide.
BTW, I think Biden is almost in the same camp. They could wheel him into the voting booth on a gurney and his supporters will still vote for him over Trump. It’s completely tribal now, and the actual qualities of the candidates don’t matter much.
How is this remotely comparable? Yes, I’d vote for a hypothetical doddering and frail old experienced Democrat over a rapist con man who tried to overturn our democratic system. How is that at all comparable to supporting the rapist con man who tried to overturn our democratic system?
All I said is that both sides will vote for their candidatre no matter what. I offered no normative judgments on either one. I never said that they were equally good or bad, and I’m not sure why you assumed that.
But for @Sam_Stone’s last paragraph I think he totally nailed it.
As trump himself says: “they’re coming for all you people. But they have to get past me.” He has appointed himself their savior and these are people who desperately want to be saved from a world they don’t understand and have been taught to thoroughly despise. And, quite frankly, a world that hasn’t treated them all that well.
it’s a match made in HeavHell.
No doubt— vote for an old man who may have lost a step or two, but is an experienced public servant who has served our country for decades, and surrounds himself with smart people….
— or —
Vote for an almost as old, criminal conman rapist who practically destroyed our Democratic system the first time around; who threw dozens of his allies under the bus; who wants to systematically gut the government until he alone is a dictator-king; who doesn’t give a shit for anybody but himself; who appeals to all the worst instincts in people.
Decisions, decisions. I know which tribe I’m in.
I will vote for Biden regardless of which R opponent he’s facing, but I don’t think that’s particularly tribal of me. I don’t identify as a Democrat, and I don’t particularly like the Democrats as a political animal. It’s just that I can’t conceive of voting for Trump under any circumstances, nor the party that enabled him and has yet to reckon with that in any sort of intellectually honest manner. My politics are closer to D than R anyway (I’m well to the left of either of them), so in a two-party system, I’m almost guaranteed to vote D. But it’s not due to tribalism, just weary resignation to the status quo and its paucity of choice.
You said “Biden is almost in the same camp”.
What changed is Trump. Of course we’re more tribal when the other side is promoting a rapist con man who tried to overturn our system of democracy. How could it be otherwise when Trump is the leader of the party?
I agree with this statement…if one of the candidates is Donald Trump.
But if there was a hypothetical race between Larry Hogan, who is probably the most moderate of all Republicans, and Joe Manchin, who is undoubtedly the most conservative of all Democrats, I don’t think that your statement would be anywhere close to true.
agreed.
As I’ve said in other contexts, most recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “It takes two sides to make peace and only one side to make war.”
What we have here in US politics is one side making a tribal war that causes the other side to retreat into a similar tribalism for survival. The difference will be that when the external tribal pressure is reduced, the second side may well recover a non-tribal attitude. I suspect the first side never will.
Same. I would love to have the option of two competent, experienced and (relatively) non-corrupt politicians to choose from so I could base my choice on policies, but the current GOP is so fundamentally dangerous to America that I’m forced to go with the other option.
Also agreed.
But, if Biden were to die or step down I would vote for whoever the Ds offer up in his place from most passionate progressive to any dishwater diplomat. To do otherwise would be contributing to the end of this country as we knew it.
If Trump were to die – I can’t see him stepping down under any imaginable circumstance – will those passionate for him transfer that passion to whoever the Rs dish up? I think not, not even for DeSantis.
That is the difference between a tribe and a cult.
How is a fascist viable? A lot of it is due to the ignorance of the population. Look at people who blame Biden for inflation. Exactly how does a president cause inflation? Is there a lever in the Oval Office labeled “Inflation” and the president pulls it one way or the other? Some people falsely blame the budget deficit. If this were true, why does inflation ramp up even as the deficit decreases? And even if there was a correlation, why not blame the party that passes irresponsible tax cuts as they are the ones who create deficits in the first place? If you don’t believe me about the cause of post-pandemic inflation, check out this report:
Looking backward, we can account fairly well for inflation behavior during the pandemic. A
tight labor market has pushed up core inflation; headline inflation has deviated from core because
of sharp rises in energy and auto prices, and supply chain problems; and pass-through from these
headline shocks has magnified the rise in core. All of these factors have been prominent in recent
discussions of inflation. We contribute a simple framework in which we quantify their roles. We
find that the combination of direct and pass-through effects from headline-inflation shocks
accounts for about 4.6 percentage points of the 6.9 percentage point rise in 12-month inflation
between end-2020 and September 2022. A rise in expected inflation accounts for 0.5 percentage
point, and the rise in labor market tightness (measured by the ratio of vacancies to unemployment)
accounts for 2.0 percentage points. The role of labor market tightness is rising over time.
Pretty much lines up with my opinion- pandemic caused sharp fall in production of most everything, then when things opened up and there was more demand for goods and services than there was supply. This was especially true in gas prices- people not working or having other places to go depressed gas demand, producers cut back production, then were caught in short supply as demand picked back up. None of this was due in any way to budget deficits. Not that deficits are not a problem that will have to be addressed, but the answer is rolling back the irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy pushed by Republicans over the past 20 years.
So inflation went up due to no fault of Biden, unemployment is nearly non-existent, yet people want to vote for Republicans because of “the economy”. Why? Why are Republicans seen as better on the ecomomy when they’re the ones who consistently wreck it?
Thinking people will not vote for Republicans based on the economy. And what about foreign policy? Why vote for a guy who spent his whole term licking Putin’s boots, tried to take a wrecking ball to NATO, and told us all he and a mad dictator were “in love”. Now the Cult 45 is trying to undermine support for Ukraine. Love of dictators and hatred of democracy has become the litmus test for membership in the Republican Party.
So why support a fascist madman over your garden variety Republicans? Either way, you get the same tax cuts for the rich, the same gutting of environmental regulations, and the same right wing judicial appointments. What does Don the Con offer that the others don’t? It’s all about the bigotry. They love him because he hates the same people that they do. And it isn’t just minorities, women, and non-heterosexuals. It’s science and truth and their perceived threat to religion. This guy gives them permission ot release their inner demons and he channels their ignorance, fear, and hatred.
So why is DJT viable? It’s because there are so many people full of hate and ignorance. They hide behind the fig leaf of worries about inflation, but the real motivation is hate. Some day they will have to answer to their grandchildren when they ask “why did you vote to end democracy?” What will their answer be- “well you see one year gas prices went up a lot”?
I think Aspenglow said it really well in this recent answer given to a question posed by @EddyTeddyFreddy in the ‘Schadenfreude’ thread; not that this hasn’t been said before, but it’s a great distillation of why trump is still viable: he’s created a cult of perpetual grievance. It gives the many people who blame everybody and everything but themselves for their problems a powerful feeling of belonging.
There was another poster who I think really got to the heart of why trump is still viable as well, either in this or another trump thread; I apologize to that poster because I don’t remember who said it or where, and I don’t have the time or inclination to try to find it now, but it went something like “the pernicious genius of the trumpist approach is that trumpists don’t bother to promise anything to their followers that will make their lives better; only that they will hurt the people who their followers hate”.
ParallelLines, probably.
That was it, thanks!
Way back in 2009 a blogger named Davis X Machina summed the mindset up thus:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
There’s also this classic line from a Trump supporter during the 2019 shutdown: “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
That’s pretty much it. In a speech a few months back Trump said something like, “I talk about tax cuts and I hardly get a response from you. But I say woke and you go crazy. You don’t even know what it means.”
“So we could kill the n****** and f***.”
You’re probably thinking of this.
“I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” Trump told an Iowa audience last week. “Because I hear woke, woke, woke — it’s just a term they use. Half the people can’t define it; they don’t know what it is.”